Within the National Observatory of Athens it has been recently established a Centre of Excellence for Earth Observation based monitoring of Natural Disasters in south-eastern Europe, named BEYOND - http://beyond-eocenter.eu/. The Center aims primarily at setting up leading edge integrated observational solutions to operate space-borne and ground-based monitoring networks in a complementary, unified and coordinated manner. The research portfolio covers a broad spectrum of phenomena such as earthquakes, volcanoes, extreme weather events, fires, fire smoke and toxic gasses, emission concentrations, manmade hazards, dust storms, air quality and impacts to human health.

The focus of BEYOND is to assemble technological expertise, know-how and research capacity to seamlessly design innovative processing chains, generate added-value products and develop end-to-end services for disaster management, environmental monitoring and climate change analyses, to serve institutional stakeholders, the scientific community, end-users and the general public, for the benefit of the environment and the society.

This session will provide a thorough insight in the activities undertaken with BEYOND Center of Excellence, giving characteristic examples of applications and products that have been systematically delivered using remotely sensed data sets, on a pre-operational and operational basis. The three thematic pillars of BEYOND will be addressed, namely meteorological and human induced hazards, geo-hazards and atmospheric pollution and air quality.

Dr. Charalabos (Haris) Kontoes is a Research Director at IAASARS/NOA and holds a PhD in Remote Sensing of the Environment. He has a wide range of expertise in managing EC and ESA projects integrating advanced image processing techniques for the exploitation of high and very high spatial resolution satellite data. He has acted as national delegate in international Space fora and organisations (e.g. EC, ESA). As delegate he participated in, a) the Steering Committee of the common EU and ESA Space Program for Environment and Security, namely GMES, b) the ESA’s Program Board on Earth Observation (2002-2004), and c) acted as deputy delegate in the Joint Space Strategy Advisory Group (JSSAG). Today he assumes responsibilities as National Delegate of the Space Committee of the FP7 Program of EC. In addition he leads/coordinates all actions foreseen in the common Greece-ESA project towards establishing in Greece (at IAASARS/NOA premises) one of the Sentinels’ Mirror Site as part of the ESA’s Collaborative Ground Segment. He is author of over than 100 scientific papers presented in peer-reviewed journals and international conferences.

Dr. Vassilis Amiridis is an Associate Researcher at IAASARS/NOA with expertise in atmospheric characterization using ground-based and satellite remote sensing observations. He has participated in more than 20 national, European and international projects and experimental campaigns. He has more than 45 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals, 110 in conference proceedings, various scientific and technical reports and over 700 third party citations. He is a member of EARLINET council and EUFAR’s active remote sensing working group and expert group for cloud microphysics. He is a member of the editorial boards of EGU’s Atmospheric Measurement Techniques (Copernicus Publications) and of ISRN Meteorology (Hindawi Publishing Corporation).

Dr. Ioannis Papoutsis: Received his diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 2002 and his Master of Science from University College London, Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, in 2003. He is currently finishing his PhD thesis, with an ELKE scholarship, on applications for monitoring crustal deformation with interferometric synthetic aperture radar techniques, at the School of Rural and Surveying Engineering of NTUA. His research interests include signal and image processing of Earth Observation imagery. He has extensive experience on working for European FP7 and GMES projects at IAASARS/NOA, including TELEIOS ICT, SAFER, linkER, MASSIVE and RISK-EOS. He is author of over than 30 scientific papers presented in peer-reviewed journals and international conferences, and has over 150 third party citations.

Mr. Panagiotis Sismanidis is a Rural and Surveying Engineer (2012), member of the Technical Chamber of Greece, and a PhD candidate in Remote Sensing at the National Technical University of Athens since 2013. He joined the Institute for Astronomy, Astrophysics, Space Applications and Remote Sensing in 2014 as a research assistant in BEYOND project. Before that he worked for two years as an early stage researcher at the Laboratory of Remote Sensing of the National Technical University of Athens, where he participated in the ARGOMARINE and TELE-KYOTO projects. He is experienced with the radiometric and atmospheric correction of remotely sensed image data. Currently, he is working on thermal and urban remote sensing. Panagiotis is a reviewer for the International Journal of Remote Sensing, and Remote Sensing Letters.